There's a pretty amazing new online music playing service from Japan, called Songle.

As described on the Songle website, "Songle is a web service for active music listening that facilitates a deeper understanding of music and enriches your music listening experience. Songle utilizes music-understanding technologies that automatically estimate music scene descriptions and enable visualizations such as structural segments, hierarchical beat structure, melody line, and chords. All users accessing the Songle service can correct estimation errors".

What does all this mean? Some pretty cool stuff actually. You can submit to the service a link to any mp3, including Soundcloud hosted songs, and it will spend a few minutes analyzing the music. As at the time of this post, there are 4,865 songs registered with Songle.

After a short time, a visual representation of the song becomes available, including analysis of the calculated beat, structural changes in the song, and perhaps most interestingly, some pretty accurate chord analysis. i.e. it will plot on screen the chords being played in the song and this is mapped to the timing of when the chords actually change during playback.

I'm sure a service like this would be a best friend to many musicians who want to quickly figure out some tricky chord progressions by simply submitting an mp3 link!

Another cool feature is the ability to browse songs by similarity from the home page. A graph of a radially-connected network is presented where songs deemed to be similar are connected to a song in the center, marked by a red play symbol. Click to make one of the songs the center song, or click the center song to listen to it in the music player.